The present invention relates to a lithography apparatus suitable for drawing at high speed a special shaped pattern including a polygon, having arbitrary angles, a rounded pattern such as a circle or an ellipse, or an arbitrary curve.
In recent years, fields of optical devices such as Fresnel zone plates and magnetic bubble devices have caused increased demand for drawing a special shaped pattern including a polygon having arbitrary angles, a rounded pattern such as a circle or an ellipse, or an arbitrary curve. For drawing such patterns by the prior art, it was necessary to disassemble the pattern to be drawn into a combination of basic patterns such as dots, segments of lines and rectangles by a computer and supply the resultant combination to a lithography apparatus as drawing data. Or it was necessary to prepare special shaped apertures corresponding to the pattern to be drawn as described in JP-A-59-169131.
In the scheme in which special shaped patterns are disassembled in a combination of basic patterns by a computer and transferred to the lithography apparatus as the drawing pattern data, however, the number of basic patterns becomes extremely large and hence it takes a long time to transfer them, resulting in a problem that it takes a long time to draw patterns. When the scheme using special shaped apertures is employed, it is possible to draw patterns having shapes of mounted apertures at extremely high speed. When patterns having special shapes of apertures which are not mounted are to be drawn, however, apertures must be replaced. In fact, therefore, it is disadvantageously difficult to draw patterns including many kinds of special shaped patterns.